THE erratic fortunes of Dazhai - an agricultural pacesetter in China during the 1960s and 1970s but subsequently left out in the cold - are again looking up.
No longer serving as a rural model, the village has turned instead to industry, commerce and tourism.
Its gross domestic product last year exceeded 10 million yuan (HK$9.03 million), 90 per cent of which came from non-agricultural production. Per capita income was 1,350 yuan, Xinhua (the New China News Agency) reported yesterday.
The village of about 100 households and 500 people in the poor and remote Xiyang county of Shanxi province was an important agricultural model under Mao Zedong.
A famous slogan of the times declared: 'To learn from Dazhai in agriculture, and to learn from Daqing in industry.' Xinhua said about 10 million people from China and abroad had visited the village during the 1960s and 1970s to learn from the Dazhai experience of turning barren slopes into high-yielding terraced fields.
But the slogan was abandoned in the 1980s when China dived headlong into economic reform and modernisation. Dazhai lost favour and was deserted as a backward place.